Quotes & Sayings About Contemporary Photography
Enjoy reading and share 14 famous quotes about Contemporary Photography with everyone.
Top Contemporary Photography Quotes
The ultimate role of photography as a contemporary language of visual communication consists of its capacity to slow down our fast and chaotic way of reading images. — Luigi Ghirri
[Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928) — Pierre Mac Orlan
Contemporary art photography is paradoxical. Anyone can look at it and form an opinion about what they see. Yet it usually represents aesthetic and theoretical positions that only a small minority of well-informed viewers can access. — Lucy Soutter
Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode. — Abigail Solomon-Godeau
Photography is, and has been since its conception, a fabulously broad church. Contemporary practice demonstrates that the medium can be a prompt, a process, a vehicle, a collective pursuit, and not just the physical end product of solitary artists' endeavors. — Charlotte Cotton
The paradox is that some of the most artistically valuable contemporary photographs are content with being photographs, are not under the same compulsion to pass themselves off - or pimp themselves out - as art. The simple truth is that the best exponents of the art of contemporary photography continue to produce work that fits broadly within the tradition of what Evans termed 'documentary style'. — Geoff Dyer
Looking into the mirror I ask myself:
"You live in a house equipped with air conditioning.
You eat tasty food.
You utilize convenient transportation to travel.
You utilize convenient information technology to live.
Could you not say that you, who do all this, are not a dictator?
Isn't it right that you life is supported by somebody else's death?
Doesn't your life that exists at the expense of somebody else's sacrifice infinitely resemble the life of a dictator who only cares about his own life?"
-Yasumasa Morimura (excerpt from "Mr. Morimura's Dictator Speech"). — Marinella Venanzi
In 1967 there was no place for photography in a contemporary art gallery. It was almost impossible to get an art dealer to look at, let alone exhibit, anything photographic. — Mel Bochner
The contemporary artist ... is not bound to a fully conceived, previsioned end. His mind is kept alert to in-process discovery and a working rapport is established between the artist and his creation. While it may be true, as Nathan Lyons stated, 'The eye and the camera see more than the mind knows,' is it not also conceivable that the mind knows more than the eye and the camera can see? — Jerry Uelsmann
Photography has an amazing ability to capture the fine detail of surface textures. But far too often these intricate patterns are loved by the photographer for their own sake. The richness of texture fascinates the eye and the photographer falls easy prey to such quickly-caught complexities. The designs mean nothing in themselves and are merely pictorially attractive abstractions. A central problem in contemporary photography is to bring about a wider significance in purely textural imagery. — Arthur Tress
While in theory digital technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by the loss of data, degradation, and noise; the noise which is even stronger than that of traditional photography. — Lev Manovich
The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity. — William J. Mitchell
For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. — Roland Barthes
If you scratch through the deceitful artifice of contemporary photography, you'll find the real artifice underneath. — Douglas McCulloh